The invention relates to question generation environments. More in detail, the invention relates to a method for automatically generating questions based on natural input text, specifically natural language input sentences.
Systems for automatically generating questions from natural language sentences are already known in prior art. For example, automatic question generation is used in automatic tutoring systems, for the purposes of teaching and testing reading comprehension.
Automatic question generation (QG) algorithms naturally separate into the sub-tasks of target selection and grammatical question generation about a target. A target is defined as the pair or tuple comprising a question type and a target phrase, where the question type may be who/what/where/when/how many/etc. or it may be a more specialized question, e.g. “What animal”. The target phrase is a contiguous portion of the input sentence on which the question is referring to. The (optionally modified) target phrase is also the answer to the question.
A major drawback of a system for automatically generating questions performing the sub-tasks of selecting a target within the input text and grammatical question selection about the target is that a large number of rules have to be considered for generating a grammatically correct question based on the target.